Google Highly Open Participation Contest

I’m at the OSDC open source conference in Australia. Leslie Hawthorn from Google just announced the Highly Open Participation Contest. It’s like Summer of Code for high-school students, with smaller tasks that can be more than code. As this is the first year, they’re going to work with projects whose mentoring really stood out in the Summer of Code—projects like Joomla, Moodle, and Silverstripe (disclosure: I’m an advisor to Silverstripe). They announced in Australia because they’re conscious that the Southern Hemisphere is discriminated against by the “Summer” part of “Summer of Code”—the projects they chose have a strong Australia and New Zealand presence. It’s great to see Google facilitating an interest in tech in those influential highschool years.

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Nat, Thanks for posting about this opportunity. The Google contest will be a great way to get high schoolers involved in software development. My 15-year-old daughter worked as an intern last summer on SchoolTool.org, an open source project. That effort resulted in a huge leap in her software development skill level and enthusiasm, not to mention making a positive contribution to the project. Participation in open source projects by motivated high school kids is extremely effective.

Thanks, Dennis. I’m chuffed to see them going below university, too. I volunteer at my kids’ school to teach computer classes, and I’ve been watching projects like Clubhouse 274 to see how they’re getting kids skills and enthusiasm beyond simple “how to make a spreadsheet” and into “how to change the world”.